Thoughts on book publishing, editing, contemporary poetry, dementia, administrative memos, and teaching by the editor of Tinfish Press.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

23 May 2017

Embrace the word
whole. “Ze hole in ze text,”
Herr Iser intoned, circa 1985. That's where we fall in like babies in
a well, before we ascend into the
headline, which rests
at the top. Tails you find the bottom, where wisdom is before it
kills you. Of course you think about suicide, he said, because you're
trying to prevent it. I just added the “w” to make the pun
complete; the hole had had a hole, albeit without a sound. Being of
sound mind, I think out loud, muttering mantras on the plane (“we
are experiencing turbulence, do not be worried,” said the Chinese
voice, too often to prevent it). Can a canned voice console? Will our
robots help us through our griefs, whether of beloved uncles or
disappointing friends? Should we can our own words, like blood or
peaches? The White House website advocated “peach” in the Middle
East. I remember someone put a large leaf over the letters “im,”
so that only “peach” turned its skin toward Kahekili
traffic. The pun in German is
with sex; the word whole is where we're headed.